4) i) .Â .Â . the only permitted use of water will be for:
(a) Drinking, and or;
(b) The washing of clothes or of the body, and or;
(c) Both public and private toilets.
Drought Act 1976
An Act to respond to water shortages and droughts in the United
Kingdom.

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Highbury, London

T

he heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the
house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along
corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and
chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the
space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of
the table.
Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.
Consider her now, yanking open the oven and grimacing in
its scorching blast as she pulls out the bread tin. She is in her
nightdress, hair still wound into curlers. She takes two steps
backwards and tips the steaming loaf into the sink, the weight
of it reminding her, as it always does, of a baby, a newborn,
the packed, damp warmth of it.
She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire
married life. She is not about to let a little thing like a heatwave get in the way of that. Of course, living in London, it
is impossible to get buttermilk; she has to make do with a
mixture of half milk and half yoghurt. A woman at Mass told
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Maggie O’Farrell
her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite
the same.
At a clacking sound on the lino behind her, she says, ‘Is that
you? Bread’s ready.’
‘It’s going to be—’ he begins, then stops.
Gretta waits for a moment before turning round. Robert
is standing between the sink and the table, his large hands
upturned, as if he’s holding a tea tray. He is staring at something. The tarnished chrome of the tap, perhaps, the runnels
of the draining-board, that rusting enamel pan. Everything
around them is so familiar, it’s impossible sometimes to tell
what your eye has been trained upon, the way a person can
no longer hear the individual notes of a known piece of
music.
‘It’s going to be a what?’ she demands. He doesn’t reply. She
moves towards him and places a palm on his shoulder. ‘You all
right?’ She has, of late, been finding herself reminded of his
age, the sudden stoop of his back, the look of mild confusion
on his face.
‘What?’ He swings his head around to look at her, as if
startled by her touch. ‘Yes,’ he nods, ‘of course. I was just saying
it’s going to be another hot one today.’
He shuffles sideways, just as she’d known he would, towards
the thermometer, which clings, by a spit-moistened sucker, to
the outside of the window.
It is the third month of the drought. For ten days now the
heat has passed 90ºF. There has been no rain – not for days,
not for weeks, not for months. No clouds pass, slow and stately
as ships, over the roofs of these houses.
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Instructions for a Heatwave
With a metallic click, like that of a hammer tapping a nail,
a black spot lands on the window, as if pulled there by magnetic
force. Robert, still peering at the thermometer, flinches. The
insect has a striated underside, six legs splaying outwards.
Another appears, at the other end of the window, then another,
then another.
‘Those buggers are back,’ he murmurs.
Gretta comes to see, jamming on her glasses. Together, they
peer at them, transfixed.
Swarms of red-backed aphids have, in the past week, been
passing over the city. They mass in trees, on car windscreens.
They catch in the hair of children coming home from school,
they find their way into the mouths of those crazy enough to
cycle in this heat, their feet adhere to the sun-creamed limbs
of people lying in their back gardens.
The aphids fling themselves from the window, their feet
detaching at the same moment, as if alerted by some secret
signal, and they disappear into the azure sky.
Gretta and Robert straighten up, in unison, relieved.
‘That’s them gone,’ he says.
She sees him glance at the clock on the wall – a quarter
to seven. At precisely this time, for more than thirty years,
he would leave the house. He would take his coat off the
peg by the door, pick up his bag, call goodbye to them all,
shouting and squawking in the kitchen, and slam the door
behind him. He always left at six forty-five, on the proverbial
dot, no matter what was happening, whether Michael Francis
was refusing to get out of bed, whether Aoife was kicking
up a stink about Godknowswhat, whether Monica was trying
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Maggie O’Farrell
to take over the cooking of the bacon. Not his department,
all that, never was. Six forty-five, and he was out the door,
gone.
He seems to feel a twitching in his limbs, she’s noticed, a
kind of vestigial urge to set off, to get going, to be out in
the world. Any minute now, she knows, he’ll be off to the
newsagent’s.
With a hand on her bad hip, she pushes the chair out from
the table with her foot, and Robert says, ‘I’ll just go round the
corner and get the paper.’
‘Right you are,’ she says, without looking up. ‘See you in
a bit.’
Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged
everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon,
a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. Which is, she reflects
as she moves the sugar bowl to one side, surprisingly rare at
their age. So many friends of hers feel overlooked or outgrown
or unseen by their husbands, like furniture kept too long. But
not her. Robert likes to know where she is at all times, he
frets if she leaves the house without telling him, gets edgy if
she slips away without him seeing, and starts ringing the
children to question them on her whereabouts. It used to
drive her crazy when they were first married – she used to
long for a bit of invisibility, a bit of liberty – but she’s used to
it now.
Gretta saws a hunk from the end of the loaf and slathers
it with butter. She gets a terrible weakness in her limbs if
she doesn’t eat regularly. She told a doctor, years ago, that
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she thought she had hypoglycemia, after reading about it in
a Sunday newspaper. Which would have explained her need
to eat quite so often, wouldn’t it? But the doctor hadn’t even
looked up from his prescription pad. ‘No such luck, I’m afraid,
Mrs Riordan,’ he’d said, the cheeky so-and-so, and handed
her a diet sheet.
The children all love this bread. She makes an extra loaf
if she’s going to visit any of them and takes it, wrapped in a
tea towel. She’s always done her best to keep Ireland alive
in her London-born children. The girls both went to
­Irish-dancing classes. They had to catch the bus all the way
to a place in Camden Town. Gretta used to take a cake tin
of brack or gingerbread with her to pass round the other
mothers – exiled like her from Cork, from Dublin, from
Donegal – and they would watch their daughters dip up and
dip down, tap their feet in time to the fiddle. Monica, the
teacher had said after only three lessons, had talent, had
the potential to be a champion. She always knew, the teacher
had said, she could always spot them. But Monica hadn’t
wanted to become a champion or to enter the competitions.
I hate it, she’d whisper, I hate it when everyone looks at you,
when the judges write things down. She’d always been so
fearful, so cautious, so backwards in coming forwards. Was it
Gretta’s fault, or were children born like that? Hard to know.
Either way, she’d had to allow Monica to give up the dancing,
which was a crying shame.
Gretta had insisted on regular Mass and communion for each
of them (although look how that had turned out). They’d gone
to Ireland every year for the summer, first to her mother’s and
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then to the cottage on Omey Island, even when they’d got
older and started to moan about the journey. When Aoife was
little, she’d loved the excitement of having to wait for the tide
to draw back off the causeway, revealing the slick, glassy sand,
before they could walk over. ‘It’s only an island sometimes,’
Aoife had said once, when she was about six, ‘isn’t that right,
Mammy?’ And Gretta had hugged her and told her how clever
she was. She’d been a strange child, always coming out with
things like that.
They were perfect, those summers, she thinks now, as
she bites down into her second slice of bread. Monica and
Michael Francis out roaming until all hours and, when Aoife
came along, a baby in a crib to keep her company in the
kitchen, before she went out to call the others in for their
tea.
No, she couldn’t have done any more. And yet Michael
Francis had given his children the most English of English
names. Not even an Irish middle name, she’d asked. She
wouldn’t allow herself to think about how they were growing
up heathen. When she’d mentioned to her daughter-in-law
that she knew of a lovely Irish-dance school in Camden, not
far from them, her daughter-in-law had laughed. In her face.
And said – what was it? – is that the one where you’re not
allowed to move your arms?
About Aoife, of course, the less said the better. She’d gone
off to America. Never called. Never wrote. Living with somebody, Gretta suspects. Nobody has told her this; call it a mother’s
instinct. Leave her alone, Michael Francis always says, if Gretta
starts to question him about Aoife. Because she knows Michael
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Francis will know, if anyone does. Always as thick as thieves,
those two, despite the age gap.
The last they’d heard from Aoife was a postcard at Christmas.
A postcard. A picture of the Empire State Building on it. For the
love of God, she’d shouted, when Robert handed it to her, is
she not even able to stretch to a Christmas card, now? As if,
she’d continued to shout, I’d never given her a proper upbringing.
She’d spent the better part of three weeks sewing a communion
dress for that child and she’d looked like an angel. Everybody
said so. Who’d have thought then, as she’d stood on the church
steps in her white dress and white lace ankle socks, veil fluttering in the breeze, that she’d grow up so ungrateful, so thoughtless that she’d send a picture of a building to her mother to mark
the Christ Child’s birthday?
Gretta sniffs as she dips her knife into the red mouth of the
jam pot. Aoife doesn’t bear thinking about. The black sheep,
her own sister had called her that time, and Gretta had flown
off the handle and told her to mind her bloody tongue, but she
has to concede that Bridie had a point.
She crosses herself, says a swift novena for her youngest child
under her breath, under the ever-watchful eye of Our Lady, who
looks down from the kitchen wall. She cuts another slice of
bread, watching the steam vanish into the air. She will not think
about Aoife now. There are plenty of good things to focus on
instead. Monica might ring tonight – Gretta had told her she’d
be near the phone from six. Michael Francis had as good as
promised to bring the children over this weekend. She will not
think about Aoife, she will not look at the photo of her in the
communion outfit that sits on the mantelpiece, no, she will not.
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After putting the bread back on the rack to air for
Robert, Gretta eats a spoonful of jam, just to keep herself
going, then another. She glances up at the clock. Quarter past
already. Robert should be back by now. Maybe he bumped into
someone and got talking. She wants to ask him will he drive
her to the market this afternoon, after the crowds heading to
the football stadium have dispersed? She needs a couple of
things, some flour, a few eggs wouldn’t go amiss. Where could
they go to escape the heat? Maybe a cup of tea at that place
with the good scones. They could walk down the street, arm
in arm, take the air. Talk to a few people. It was important to
keep him busy: ever since the retirement, he can become
brooding and bored if confined to the house for too long. She
likes to organise these outings for them.
Gretta goes out through the living room into the hall, opens
the front door and walks out on to the path, side-stepping
that rusting carcass of a bicycle Robert uses. She looks left,
she looks right. She sees next door’s cat arch its back, then
walk in mincing, feline steps along the wall, towards the lilac
bush, where it proceeds to scratch its claws. The road is empty.
No one about. She sees a red car caught mid-manoeuvre,
further up the road. A magpie keens and moans overhead,
wheeling sideways in the sky, wing pointing downwards. In
the distance, a bus grinds up the hill, a child trundles on a
scooter along the pavement, someone somewhere turns on a
radio. Gretta puts her hands on her hips. She calls her husband’s
name, once, twice. The flank of the garden wall throws the
sound back to her.